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Hi and Lois, 11/15/23

The sun won’t blast off its outer layers, forming a planetary nebula and leaving only a tiny white dwarf behind, for another seven to eight billion years or so, and while that is the unfathomably distant future, it’s not strictly speaking correct to say that Trixie’s best friend will last “forever.” Still, Sunbeam will be around for a lot longer than Suzy here, who even in a best-case scenario will be dead by sometime in the 2110s.

Marvin, 11/15/23

If you had told me in the abstract that Marvin wanted to branch out beyond “Ha ha, Marvin has shat himself and is proud of it” jokes, I would obviously endorse it. But please, do not waste your time and mine with marital misanthropy jokes that are two orders of magnitude too unfunny to make it in The Lockhorns! Better poop than this!

The Phantom, 11/15/23

Yes, The Phantom is still somehow doing the “Death of the Phantom” arc, and no, I’m still not going to catch you up on the details. But I do need to point out that this strip, which has never been shy about tastefully implied nudity, has just discovered the funniest ever use of a word balloon.

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Blondie, 11/14/23

I confess that I find the idea of a butcher who thinks about individual animals (whose carcasses he plans to eventually sell to people who want to eat them) as if they were sports prospects, to the extent that he knows their detailed stats, to be kind of charming. That’s why I’m profoundly disappointed that the final punchline involves the fake “MPG” stat, which sounds like a car thing, when they coud’ve used a fake sports thing. It’s all about the execution, buddy, and you screwed it up!

Six Chix, 11/14/23

Oh, I guess these space aliens are a recurring Six Chix bit now. Today we learn that, while these futuristic beings have evolved beyond our primitive views on gender, they are here to remind us that having a big juicy ass transcends the binary.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 11/13/23

You know, at first I thought this was about the eternal struggle between the modern scientific method, as represented by Doc Pritchart and his flatlander medical degree, and the ancient, chthonic folk wisdom of the Holler, as represented by Granny Creeps and her cave full of potions. But then I realized that Doc is probably just trying to stop Snuffy from getting poisoned. He’s right to worry! Who the hell knows what’s in that stuff she’s going to give him!

Pluggers, 11/13/23

Look, Pluggers, I get that you’re a comic whose whole thing is that you take submissions from your readers who are, by definition, pluggers, and pluggers absolutely love to forward emails consisting of jokes that they themselves did not write to their friends and loved ones, but I feel like maybe you should Google those submitted jokes to make sure they aren’t from, say, Cool Funny Quotes Dot Com’s collection of quotes by Anonymous or a weirdly padded blog post on Grumpy Fuckers Dot Com written by “Royston Butterscotch” or a magnet you can buy from Fem Power Gifts by Getbullish or X, the website formerly known as Twitter before you go to the trouble of illustrating them with anthropomorphic chickens.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/13/23

It doesn’t count as “dramatic tension” per se, but for weeks now I’ve been really unable to tell whether or not Mud is supposed to be sincere about the Mirakle Method or not. I guess he believes both that the Method can improve your life and that people are rational economic actors who always have access to the full information they need to make spending decisions that will never regret. Buzzy, though? Buzzy seems shady. Feel like Buzzy’s gonna get forcibly Mirakl’d in the not so distant future, i.e., he’ll be weeping openly as he contemplates his own personal swingset on the moon.

Gasoline Alley, 11/13/23

I often have fun on this blog trying to figure out where exactly various syndicated newspaper strips take place. But, Gasoline Alley? Never really cared to put the energy into it, to be honest with you all. Good thing, too, because all I had to do is wait it out for a while until today, when the strip tells us the characters all live near Charlotte, North Carolina. Who would’ve guessed? Not me, I admit, but as noted I wouldn’t have tried very hard.